Facebook Is Ditching Bing's Search Results

Facebook and Microsoft have had a relatively long-standing partnership when it comes to search: for years, Facebook searches would also show Bing results, and Bing queries have thrown up results from your friends. But history seems to mean very little to Facebook, which appears to have quietly killed Bing results.

Reuters quotes a Facebook spokesperson as saying "We're not currently showing web search results in Facebook Search because we're focused on helping people find what's been shared with them on Facebook." It's true that search has long been an area of interest for Facebook, but one that it's comprehensively failed to capitalise on -- even the introduction of its vaunted 'Graph Search' capabilities failed to turn Facebook into a leader in web search.

The latest strategy isn't just about ditching Bing, though -- Facebook is introducing the ability to search for specific posts at the same time. If nothing else, it's an impressive feat of engineering, since humanity has managed to generate over a trillion posts by this stage, which is quite a lot of crap to be sifting through.

As for the future of Microsoft and Facebook, the company is still promising amicible relationships, with a Facebook spokesperson promising that "We continue to have a great partnership with Microsoft in lots of different areas." [Reuters]